Josh Rogin
As China ramps up its cyberattacks on Taiwan’s democracy, the island’s leaders are building both the infrastructure for defense and the capabilities to fight back. One of the Taiwanese government’s major projects is preparing a backup system to keep the country online if China tries to cut it off from the internet altogether.
Beijing is deploying cyber campaigns in many countries but nowhere as intensively as in Taiwan. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan in August, the Chinese government took its tactics to a new level. Beijing coordinated conventional retaliatory measures, such as missile tests, mock bombing runs and military exercises that mimicked a blockade, with a cyberwarfare and disinformation campaign meant to disrupt Taiwan’s democracy and undermine its people’s grasp on reality.
Taiwan is responding by bolstering its cyber resilience. The Ukraine war has heightened Taipei’s sense of urgency by demonstrating that a country under attack can’t necessarily rely on foreign governments or foreign billionaires — such as Elon Musk — when the crisis hits. And the reality is that China and Taiwan are already locked in online conflict on many fronts.
“It’s not like we’re preparing ourselves for something in the future,” Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first “digital minister,” told me in an interview in Taipei. “What we’re facing now will probably continue for a while, and we need to prepare ourselves for it, much like we prepare our infrastructure for earthquakes.”
Tang’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, which opened just this August, is central to Taiwan’s effort to build cyber resilience among the population and update government institutions.
Taiwan’s most ambitious project is building a network of non-geostationary satellites to keep the internet going if Beijing cuts the undersea internet cables. The project is still in its early stages. The goal is to have 700 satellite receivers deployed in low- or mid-earth orbit, connected to mobile 5G towers on the ground. Applications for vendors are set to open this month.
One possible application could be Musk’s company SpaceX, which operates the satellite communications network Starlink, with more than 3,000 small satellites in low-earth orbit. Starlink has been crucial to Ukraine’s ability to keep its broadband capabilities intact so both the government and journalists can do their jobs and fight Moscow’s disinformation.
But Musk threatened to stop providing Starlink for Ukraine after Ukrainian officials criticized his public proposals for a Moscow-friendly negotiating platform. Taiwan’s government wants a system that can’t be cut off by any foreign firm or business executive. Taiwan’s leaders know that in the first days of a Chinese attack, Taiwan’s ability to communicate directly with the world will be crucial to its survival.
“A lot of international correspondents are in Taiwan now,” said Tang. “If we don’t provide them with a broadband link in the event of a disaster, natural or unnatural, then of course, the disinformation will win the war.”
Musk has also proposed that Taiwan rejoin China under the one-country, two-systems model, an idea that Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me was exactly the same as Beijing’s line.
“It’s a Chinese proposal,” Wu said. “The people of Taiwan … they are not interested in this.”
In the meantime, Taipei is already fighting a daily battle against Chinese hybrid cyberwarfare and disinformation campaigns. Beijing has used its information warfare machine to undermine Taiwanese people’s confidence in their government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Chinese influence campaigns promote pro-Beijing candidates in Taiwanese elections. Most recently, China is focused on convincing Taiwanese people that their democracy is a facade and that their leaders are controlled by the CIA.
Increasingly, Tang said, Beijing is integrating disinformation and cyberattacks to powerful effect. After the Pelosi visit in August, cyber attackers disabled the website of the Taiwanese president’s office and its Ministry of National Defense. While the websites were offline, propagandists spread disinformation about the Taiwanese government’s actions, knowing people could not refer to the official sources. Hackers took over an electronic billboard at a rail station and broadcast an anti-Pelosi, pro-Chinese Communist Party message.
Tang, 41, represents a generation of Taiwanese people who have never experienced being ruled by China and don’t want to be. Both of her grandfathers fought against the Chinese Communist Party for the Republic of China Armed Forces, also known at the time as the Nationalist army. Her father was a journalist in Tiananmen Square in the runup to the June 1989 massacre of students.
She rose to prominence during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, in which she used her hacker skills to help student protesters occupying the Legislative Yuan broadcast their message. That led to her helping the government implement media literacy programs in Taiwan’s schools. The island’s first transgender cabinet minister, she often wears a shirt with Ukraine’s coat of arms on it.
Tang’s personal mission is to use technology to decentralize government and increase civic engagement. For example, Taiwan created an online contest to allow people to vote for their favorite vaccine, as an attempt to turn vaccine skepticism into vaccine adoption. A “humor over rumor” campaign helped fight covid disinformation in an engaging way.
Not all of Taiwan’s solutions will apply to the United States, where disinformation often comes from within our political system. But China’s tactics are increasingly being used inside America. Chinese hackers are attacking U.S. government websites. Beijing’s influence operations are widespread on American social media platforms and in the American media.
The good news is that China’s favored narrative about the superiority of autocracies is being undermined by Xi Jinping’s faltering economy, “wolf warrior” diplomacy and unpopular domestic crackdowns. Democracies such as Taiwan, Ukraine and the United States are “natural allies” in fighting China’s cyberwarfare strategy, Tang said, but they must do more to prove that their model can work better in a digital world.
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